Hey, I'd be honoured to have coffee with her. She's a legend. That doesn't make HMT not a YA book. There's a reason it's part of so many high school curricula alongside Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World and 1984 and Catcher in the Rye. I'm not saying those are bad books by any means, but they aren't especially sophisticated. I had the same problem with the much-hyped Babel which, although I align politically with it, was as subtle as being hit in the face with a sledgehammer engraved with "colonialism bad".